Saturday, April 23, 2016

Someday My Prince Will Come

Two things are starting to get to me in the flood of public mourning of Prince's death.

One is less serious, but a lot of what I see isn't really mourning,
it's whining. Yes, it's sad that Prince died, and that he died relatively
young. (Not compared to Mozart, Schubert or any number of other greats,
of course.) But the same reaction is applied to people who die even at
quite advanced ages. It was kind of creepy during
the years of Nelson Mandela's decline, when many people freaked out
every time he went into the hospital. I think that if they could have,
they'd have kept him on life support forever, as tired and sick as he was.
There seems to be a real panic and inability to
cope with the fact that people are mortal. This is especially strange given how many of these people are religious
or "spiritual." One reason I don't miss having a religion is that religion
doesn't really seem to help most people cope with mortality, their own
or others'.

The other is more serious, though a bit less common:
the people who are putting up memes and other material lamenting the
fact that Kanye West, or Ted Nugent, or Justin Bieber is still alive.
If you can't mourn one celebrity's loss without this kind of vicious and
mean-spirited attack on anybody else, then something is wrong with you.
That goes double for those of you who are ostentatiously religious or
"spiritual." That's another reason I don't miss having a religion; it
really doesn't seem to improve people's characters. (A more common
version of this is the conservative Christians I know who alternate
between posting vile racist crap on one hand, and fake-nicey-nice
religious platitudes on the other. You're not fooling me, folks, and if
you're not fooling me you're certainly not fooling Jesus or Buddha.
I'll see you in Hell. Yet the people who are upset at the surivival of
West and Nugent tend to be liberals, both in politics and religion.
Remember, Jesus said that the vast majority of human beings would be
damned. I'll see you in Hell, too, while Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum
watch our torment from the bosom of Abraham.)

But at the same
time, both of these are reasons why I think that social media like
Facebook are worthwhile: it lets so many people show their asses in
public, so that any illusions I might otherwise have about them are
dispelled. It's not pleasant, but knowledge is better than ignorance to
my mind.

And the rest of you who don't fall into either of these camps, carry on; I'm not criticizing you.